I find myself here musing tonight. On my tasklist was the assignment to update the Rounding Off Infinity website. And I found myself asking the question ”Why?”
“For what?”
Somewhere along the way, there was a mission for my original web-presence, GearWERKZ, which was solely written. Its notion was that I did not care about “hits”, or any notion of how widely my content was circulated. That if my writings, and eventually, the beginnings of E2KG, in my podcasting efforts…if just 1 person learned something from them, then I had accomplished my mission.
Along then came the metamorphosis into Rounding Off Infinity, which expanded my podcasting efforts more, added my social media presence, as well as a streaming and Let’s Play video channel. And without really thinking through it, the mission took on an effort to create a shrine of my love of video games. But it was also more outward than the old GearWERKZ content mission. I became more concerned about impacting people. Showing them that we are all individual gamers, that we can all love different things, and that over the span of our lives as gamers, of which my own has now encompassed several decades, that it will be a journey. That we will change. That we will chase our passion into the sun, and into the darkness, across nebulas of dust and gas and back out again.
In becoming concerned about that impact, I unknowingly allowed myself to be impacted by the deterioration of the conversation of gaming in today’s gathering spaces. It’s not only the drag of console wars, but, in my opinion, it’s also the rise of a demographic of consumer who abdicates any notion of their own accountability for controlling their interaction with art, media, and entertainment. It’s the consumer whose sole requirement is the low cost of access, with complete disregard for any notion of quality.
The rise of these forces has mixed with the emboldening forces of anonymity and entitlement to yield a before unseen level of intolerance. And I became convinced that I had no desire to enter into the conversation any impartment of self and my own love of video games.
Half of my podcasting life is now having a conversation on video games in front of people who will agree or disagree with you on the sole basis of whether or not your comment in the moment is a pro- or negative Xbox or PlayStation perspective. I had little desire to expand that into the rest of everything else I do in and around video games.
And the situation has bottomed out with mainstream gaming media directly participating in this behavior in the name of engagement farming, monetization, and their efforts to wrest back market-share they lost to YouTubers.
There used to be a time when talking about video games and the industry was just fun.
Rounding Off Infinity 